Greatest I am wrote: ↑Tue Jan 30, 2018 4:02 pm
My money is on evolution as it explains all the human to human evil quite nicely.
Regards
DL
My money is on evolution, too.
Evil is relative. It is a biology thing: whatever hurts me or my interests, is evil, whatever does not hurt me in any way, is not evil.
In any exchange which is not equitable, evil happens to one party, and a non-evil happens to another party. If a lion fells a gazelle, it's evil to the gazelle, but not evil to the lion. It is evil of me from your perspective to invade France, but in my perspective, Napoleon's wars were evil.
Now. Humans have a funny thing, and try to declare that something is evil, no matter what. And that is self-delusional. Moral relativism works, but only when you think about it long and hard enough. Moral absolutism can always be reduced to moral relativism, and further down to pragmatism.
Add to this that moral absolutism is a good vehicle to influence people's behaviour on a mass scale. That is precisely one of the strongest uses of it for religions. And yet forcing absolutism on people is not completely evil for all or for many: it strengthens society's interests, and as such, though it pits individuals' interests against society's, in most social arrangement every member of the society is better off than without. If not everyone is better off than without, the situation is so unstable, that it can't be sustained for long (given a large enough number of society members who are worse off than alone.) Khmer Rouge is one example; turn-of-the-century (from nineteenth to twentieth century) era of absolute oppression and dismarginalization (i.e. a treatment worse than marginalization) of the proletariat was another.